This is Release Candidate 2 for FreeNAS 8.0.1….hopefully the last stepping stone to FreeNAS 8.0.1-RELEASE.

*** IMPORTANT ***

The image size increased in 8.0.1-BETA3.Â The new size requires a 2 GB storage device.Â The GUI upgrade can be used to upgrade a system from BETA3,Â BETA4, or RC1 but upgrades from earlier releases can only be done from the CD. The other option is to save the config, reinstall the new version, then restore the config.

Major changes:

- The mail subsystem has been rewritten due to major interop issues with the previous implementation of the mail subsystem and various mail server setups (including gmail).Â This was done by removing msmtp and replacing it’s functionality with python code. (r7756, r7757, r7758 )

The September issue of BSD Magazine has an article describing how to backup the home directories on a PC-BSD system to FreeNAS 8.0.1 using Life Preserver. The article is on page 10-14 of the magazine, which is available as a PDF for free download. A PDF of just this article is also available on Slideshare.

Josh announced the availability of FreeNAS-8.0.1-RC1 last night. From the announcement:

I’m pleased to announce that FreeNAS-8.0.1 Release Candidate 1 is available for download.

Release Notes for FreeNAS 8.0.1-RC1

This is the first release candidate for FreeNAS 8.0.1. At this point, we are no longer including new features or functionality into 8.0.1. From here on out, only bug fixes and regressions will be addressed.

*** IMPORTANT ***

The image size increased in 8.0.1-BETA3. The new size requires a 2 GB storage device. The GUI upgrade can be used to upgrade a system from BETA3 or BETA4, but upgrades from earlier releases can only be done from the CD. The other option is to save the config, reinstall the new version, then restore the config.

Major changes:

- There is no longer a default password. The GUI can be accessed without a password until one is set. The root shell user also does not have a default password, which means that logins by root from the console or via ssh are impossible until this is done. The edit password field for the GUI admin user contains a checkbox to set the root shell user password to the same value.

- The GUI incorporates an alert system in the form of a stoplight that is visible from every page in the GUI. If the light is red or yellow clicking on it will open a window with the condition that is causing the alert. On new installs the light will be red due to their being no password set for the GUI. Also, when there are no alerts a Green Light is displayed. Clicking the Green Light opens a blank dialog.

- Netatalk 2.2 is included, which provides support for Time Machine backups to OS X Lion clients.

- Deleting ZFS volumes is now really an export operation, which means that a “deleted” volume can be imported via the volume importer until the member disks are reused in a new volume. The GUI contains options for wiping the disks if you really want the volume to be non-recoverable, as well as an option for not cascading the deletion of a volume to shares based on that volume.

- The system now supports disabling the creation of a swap partition on every device in a volume. Furthermore, since L2ARC and cache devices are generally small, high speed, and more expensive $/GB than the main storage drives, swap to these devices is always disabled.

- UFS volumes support setting arbitrary mount points, this can be leveraged to move /var to a persistent storage device.

Changes since 8.0.1-BETA4

- Rework the stats gathering daemon to pull volume information from the database and exclude all other volumes. This should fix issues where systems with large numbers of snapshots were filling up /var as the system would try to collect stats on each snapshot.

- Support for remote syslog servers.

- Rework and improvement in snapshot replication tasks.

- iSCSI file extents use the directory browser.

- Support multiple lagg interfaces properly.

- Bulk manipulation of snapshots.

- Ability to specify a bind address for the webGUI.

- Add support for alias IPs on interfaces.

- Add support for the RocketRaid 4322 and 4321.

- Add the user info to allow anonymous FTP setups to work properly.

- Fix disk replacement in RAIDZ volumes.

- Add iozone and iperf to the base system.

- Add sge network driver.

- Update to Samba 3.5.11 version, plus security fixes.

- Fix the NTFS volume importer.

- Add the ability to specify the port the webGUI uses.

- Add sym driver to the build.

- Add wget to the base system.

- Add iperf to the base system.

- Raise default blocksize and fragment size for UFS to 32K and 4K.

- Add some shell customizations and aliases to make the default shell more useful.

- Add uplcom to the kernel.

- Add an SNMP module in that provides a number of useful MIBs.

Errata:

iSCSI doesn’t work with VMWare ESXi 5.0. An update to the iSCSI target software that addresses this issue will be available before 8.0.1-RELEASE.